Thin thermal control coatings have many beneficial applications. For example, thin thermally conducting coatings can be used to transport heat along or through structural surfaces away from localized heat sources, such as exhaust ports or hypersonic leading edges on a military aircraft and missiles. These thermal control coatings, as opposed to structural thermal management systems like radiators or active thermal control systems like fluid cooling, would greatly enhance future military systems by reducing weight and complexity while improving manufacturability. Current thermal diffusion and protection coatings used for satellite antenna systems are extremely expensive, not very robust, and hard to process. Additionally, active cooling systems require additional mass, volume, and power further limiting system design and performance. It is therefore desirable to provide a thermal control coating that overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art while retaining their advantages.
In particular, it would be desirable to provide a more robust, inexpensive, easily processed thermal control coating onto a substrate and scaled to cover large areas, such as an exhaust port, a hypersonic leading edge, a satellite antenna, etc. In addition, it would be desirable to provide a thermal control coating that can be used to direct heat on a small localized scale, such as spreading heat away from a microelectronics circuit chip.
Moreover, good thermal conductors require high perfection/order on the sub-phonon scale. Currently this is achieved by vapor deposition but it is not easily scalable to large areas of coverage. Self-assembled coatings provide a high level of perfection/order on the sub-phonon scale while allowing large scale surface coverage. As such, it would be desirable to provide a thermal control coating that can be scalable to large areas.